DOJ will let Microsoft antitrust oversight expire in May

The decade-old antitrust settlement between Microsoft and the U.S. government will end May 12, after Department of Justice attorneys on Wednesday said they would not challenge the expiration.

Since 2001, Microsoft has functioned under DOJ oversight to make sure the software giant was abiding by the terms of the settlement, which mainly required Microsoft to share the Windows application programming interface (API) with the industry and sell licenses for reasonable prices. It’s that oversight which will end next month.

“And so May 12 will close an important chapter in the history of antitrust law,” Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly said Wednesday during the final oversight hearing at U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., according to Reuters.

The DOJ sued Microsoft in 1998 over the company’s bundling of Internet Explorer with Windows, alleging that business practice was anticompetitive. A judge ruled in favor of the government in 2000 but the decision was overturned upon appeal, leading the DOJ to offer a settlement with the software giant.

Microsoft changed during that time, transitioning from a naive, lobby-shy firm to a corporate machine with plenty of D.C. ties, wrote Michael Kinsley in the Los Angeles Times. The Slate founder (the online magazine was part of Microsoft when it started in 1995) wrote that the Redmond-based company became Public Enemy No. 1 – though things have calmed down by now.

“Best of all, the finger of blame has moved on – to Google, which now gets the blame for everything,” Kinsley wrote April 5. “It is an evil monopoly that uses its power to extend that monopoly into new areas. It must be stopped before all its competitors are wiped out. And so on. This is all very familiar to anyone who worked at Microsoft in the late 1990s, and (it must be admitted) very enjoyable.”

But Google also represents a tech industry that has drastically changed since Bill Gates sat in front of antitrust committees in the late ’90s.

“Obviously Microsoft still has has a very large share of the laptop/desktop operating system world,” Marc Schildkraut, an antitrust attorney with the law firm Dewey and LeBoeuf, told Reuters. “They’re obviously trying to compete with Google, with Bing, but I don’t think they’re getting anywhere.”

With oversight nearly over, Microsoft can relax a bit and perhaps get more nimble. For 10 years, Microsoft has had to run many business decisions by the Justice Department, and has dedicated a staff of several hundred to deal with the oversight.

“We are pleased with today’s hearing,” a Microsoft spokesperson said in a Wednesday statement. “As was noted by the court and the plaintiffs, we are on track for the final judgments to expire on May 12.”